DARPA Unveils Speedy Solar-Powered Smart Blimp

The military often gets to check out exciting green technology before the general public. Case in point: DARPA‘s new smart blimp, an automated, unmanned airship featuring an advanced radar system, solar cells, and a fuel cell to store energy at night. Dubbed The Integrated Sensor Is the Structure (ISIS), the helium-filled blimp takes advantage of its radar system to offer up high-resolution images of battlefield scenes.

According to its creators at MITRE, the blimp can move at 60 knots during sustained trips and 100 knots during a sprint–so ISIS can make it to anywhere on Earth within 10 days of launch. Flying over six miles in the air, ISIS is able to avoid both ground-based missiles and air-to-air missiles.

So will we be flying around in speedy solar-powered blimps sometime soon? Probably not. The Air Force and DARPA won’t have a prototype of ISIS ready until 2013, and consumer applications won’t come until much later. But eventually, the technology could change the way we use solar power for transportation.